Romancing SaGa – Minstrel Song- Remastered Review

Initial release date: December 1, 2022

Platforms: Nintendo Switch, Windows, PS4

Series: SaGa

Composer: Kenji Ito

Designers: Akitoshi Kawazu, Kenji Ito, Kyoji Koizumi, Yusuke Naora, Tetsuya Takahashi, Yoshinori Kitase

Developers: Square, Square Enix, Bullets

Publishers: Square, Square Enix

"Review Copy Provided By Square-Enix"

Romancing SaGa – Minstrel Song- Remastered is a remaster of a PS2 remake of the Super Famicom original Romancing SaGa. The SaGa series as a whole is unlike any other series that’s out there and is essentially the originator of the go anywhere and craft your own narrative RPGs that western RPGs have been utilizing for the last 2+ decades. While the SaGa series has never been exactly mainstream, it has always had a strongly dedicated fanbase that has eaten up each entry that has released in the series’ 3 decades long tenure. Romancing SaGa is one of the most open-ended RPGs I’ve ever played. I say that because the game in no way holds your hand nor does it tell you really where to go or what to do. This level of open-endedness will be off-putting to the majority of gamers and is one of the reasons that the series has never really be put on the pedestal of JRPG greats such as Final Fantasy, Mana, and more.

Literally every action that you take changes the very narrative of the game. You’re able to gain quests and yet even in getting quests, the game doesn’t force you on any particular questline nor does it tell you what to do nor who to talk to in order to progress the quest lines. You select one of eight protagonists at the start of the game with each of these characters on a journey to stop the impending revival of a god of destruction. Depending on who you decide to start the game as also determines what village or town on the overworld map that you begin in.

You’ll find various towns to explore with each one of them having various shops and blacksmiths and inns. Everything costs money, and if there’s one thing that this game hammers home is that you need money and yet you rarely will find money unless you come across a treasure chest in a dungeon or complete a quest as battling enemies rarely ever gives you much if any money. You’ll need to learn how proficiencies work as they give you a lot of options in how you play the game. There are proficiencies that you’ll need to find treasure chest hidden in dungeons, jump across chasms, avoid surprise encounters, and more. Increasing these proficiencies occurs as you use them more so make sure to use them as much as possible.

When it comes to the battle mechanics of Romancing SaGa – Minstrel Song, this is where it vastly differs from the traditional JRPG formula as most would encourage you to continually grind to level up and get better gear whereas Romancing SaGa doesn’t incentive you battle constantly as if you constantly battle then you will raise your Event Rate and will raise the levels of your enemies making the game substantially more difficult while also locking you out of potential items and characters. This has always been a unique aspect of the SaGa series, and yet I wish they would’ve removed this aspect from the remaster as the game is so widely open after the first act that you’ll want to explore as much as you can.

Another aspect of gameplay that is unique to SaGa games is the way in which your characters learn new abilities. During battles, your party members will randomly gain new techniques that are unique to the weapons that they are wielding. This keeps the combat fresh no matter how often you get into battles as you may get a new ability that will give you that needed pow to you attacks.

Weapons have durability limits that will drop as you use specific techniques, and if you over abuse these techniques then your weapons will break and be unusable until you go to a blacksmith to repair or reinforce them or sleep at an inn at a higher rate. This reinforces the risk vs rewards of battles and makes your approach to situations be more strategically.

What I appreciate about this remaster is the quality of life improvements that allow you to increase the games speed with a speed toggle and a new map HUD that can be moved about with the right stick.

Romancing SaGa – Minstrel Song- Remastered is a phenomonal game that requires you to invest time into it to learn its unique mechanics, gameplay loops, and get used to its open-ended nature. The worst thing that you can do with Romancing SaGa – Minstrel Song- Remastered is to go into it expecting a Final Fantasy-esque experience or a traditional JRPG experience as this game and franchise lives and dies by its own unique rules on the JRPG formula. The game wants you to replay it multiple times and play as all the characters as it will open up into being one of the most uniquely brilliant RPGs that I’ve played in some time. The only thing I can knock this game for it’s the lack of a modernized tutorial to ease players into this franchises’ mechanics and the penalization of wanting to grind in the games admittedly fun battles. If you’re looking for a masterpiece of a JRPG, then Romancing SaGa – Minstrel Song- Remastered is worth sinking your teeth into.